Secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega / WED 12-10-25 / Final boss in the game God of War / Rapper who co-starred in 1994's "Above the Rim" / Several things in a pagoda / Ax, so to speak / First name in daring jumps / Iconic repeated Keanu Reeves role / "Community" character played by Donald Glover / Performer of the 1992 dance song "Supermodel (You Better Work)"

Constructor: Kareem Ayas

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: UNDER REPAIR (28D: Status of 23-, 44- and 69-Across, as indicated by their clues and placement in the grid) — the answers are things that are UNDER REPAIR in two senses: they are in need of fixing (indicated by their warning sign-like clues), and they are under a pair of "RE"s (in shaded squares):

Theme answers:

• PRERECORDED (19A: Like voice mail messages, for example)
•  PRINTER (23A: OUT OF ORDER! 🚫🚫🚫 PAPER TRAY REQUIRES MAINTENANCE!)

•  NATURERESERVE (42A: Protected lands for plants and animals)
• ESCALATOR (44A: OUT OF ORDER! 🚫🚫🚫 USE STAIRS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!)

• ROSESARERED (63A: Love poem opener)
•      TOILET (69A: OUT OF ORDER! 🚫🚫🚫 USE SECOND-FLOOR BATHROOM INSTEAD!

Word of the Day: pagoda (34D: Several things in a pagoda => TIERS) —

A pagoda is a tiered tower with multiple eaves, common in Tibet, Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, India, China, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia. Most pagodas were built to have a religious function, most often Buddhist, but sometimes Taoist or Hindu, and were often in or near viharas. The pagoda traces its origins to the stupa, while its design was developed in ancient India.^[1] Chinese pagodas (Chinese: 塔; pinyin: Tǎ) are a traditional part of Chinese architecture. In addition to religious use, since ancient times Chinese pagodas have been valued for the spectacular views they offer, and many classical poems attest to the joy of scaling pagodas. (wikipedia)

• • •

That was a long way to go for that revealer joke. For me, too long. I can admire the construction of this puzzle while also being frank about the fact that most of the solve was not very enjoyable to me, both because the fill was generally below average (not surprising given the structural demands of the theme), and because staring at RERE after RERE without having any idea why was just unpleasant. Shaded nonsense ... not my idea of a good time. Yes, the revealer explains the RERE perfectly well. But a pair of "RE"s, as a visual element, is just plain ugly to my eyes. The first RERE made me think I had a mistake ("why would you put gibberish like that in shaded squares?"). The second RERE made me realize the first RERE was right and the puzzle was just doing some mysterious, elaborate bit. The second RERE also made the third RERE self-evident—I just filled those remaining shaded squares in and the whole answer there was instantly clear:

So I solved this exactly as it was designed to be solved—all the RERE business and then ... the Big Reveal! I was grateful for that revealer—the whole puzzle is dependent on it, as there is nearly no pleasure to be had before it or without it. So, your enjoyment of this puzzle will probably ride on how much of a pleasure burst you got from the revealer. For me, it merely explained what was going on and pulled the puzzle back from "bad" to "just fine." I don't know that the rickety build-up was worth the finale. But I do think it's a creative and ambitious theme. Ambivalence! That's the real word of the day.

The fill started creaking real early, with the resurrected corpse of EVEL Knievel jumping into the grid right up top and the resurrected corpse of PEI joining him soon after—two crosswordese icons of yore, linked together by ... EVENER 🙁 I'm pretty sure I uttered many actual UHS today (including when I got the answer UHS). There's just a giant angry swirl of green ink on my puzzle print-out around the entire section that extends above and below RICE PADDY. The ugliness arguably stretches all the way to the bottom of the grid (down where ARLO DTS URSA live), but it's densest there around RICE PADDY, with ATMS MCS SEEDER DOER AVEC PROSIT SRI congealing into an unappetizing mass. As I said above, I know why the theme buckles like this—you don't have three themers today, you have six, and they come as conjoined pairs, and that much fixed theme material would be very, very hard to build a clean grid around. You too would find yourself resorting to clumps of ECO CFO NSFW and the like. The puzzle does manage to get off a couple of longer colorful answers, specifically RUPAUL strutting with VEGGIE BACON (PETA would be so happy). But overall, wading through this puzzle was often somewhat tedious (if not particularly difficult).

[Performer of the 1992 dance song "Supermodel (You Better Work)"]

I had trouble primarily with small stuff today. Stuff like END, what the hell is with that clue? (12D: Ax, so to speak). Is this like a program that you "END"—so "END" as in "cut"? And "Ax" as in "cut"? Is that it? OK. Not natural synonyms to my ear, but defensible, I guess. I thought the thunderbolt wielder was THOR (11A: Thunder bolt wielder => ZEUS). I forgot that the [Secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega] was ZORRO and thought maybe EL CID. I was convinced that Donald Glover played a TREY on Community (58D: "Community" character played by Donald Glover), which made the TOILET hard to find for a bit. No idea if the N.F.L. linemen were DTS (defensive tackles) or DES (defensive ends) (although DES is never clued that way, which I should've realized). Forgot there was a Matrix character called ORACLE. Two Matrix characters in this grid why?? There was a niche-iness to the pop culture answers that grated a little. Community character, "final boss" of some video game, multiple Matrix characters ... none of these had to be pop culturey at all. I think once or twice you can steer regular words and phrases into pop cultural territory if that floats your boat, but doing it again and again = 🚫🚫🚫.

Bullets:

• 29D: Trampoline mats (BEDS) — as with END, I just stared at this answer wondering "really?" Are the mats beside the trampoline? For when you ... dismount? Or in case you fall off. Because I've never seen a mat *on* a trampoline. This illustration says the thing you actually jump on is called a "jumping mat"—is that the BED? Words can't express how uninterested I am in trampolines.

• 33A: Green dispensaries? (ATMS) — I think this wants to be a (marijuana) dispensary joke, but if ATMS wants to hide from me, it's going to have to do a way better job than this.
• 34D: Several things in a pagoda (TIERS) — big vocabulary fail today. I looked at "pagoda" and all I could see in my mind's eye was one of those wooden structures ... you see them in backyards and parks ... open on the sides, covered, maybe domed? ... eventually I realized that my brain was stuck somewhere between "pergola" and "gazebo" (the latter of which was the more elusive of the pair—I literally googled "small covered structure in garden or park" in order to jog "gazebo" loose from my brain, ugh. Anyway, most gardens and parks don't have pagodas.

[not a pagoda]

• 56A: Hole in the wall (RAT TRAP) — "Hole in the wall" suggests somewhere out of the way, undiscovered. "A small, very modest, often out-of-the-way place," says American Heritage Dictionary. Nothing in there about ****ing rats!? RAT TRAP is intensively negative in a way that "Hole in the wall" just isn't. I might eat at a hole in the wall. A RAT TRAP ... probably not.

That's all. See you next time. Remember, my annual 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 extravaganza starts tomorrow, so if you want your pet to be part of the parade (which will likely extend into the new year), get that photo to me today (rexparker at icloud dot com). Many of the photos are memorial photos, which adds to the poignancy of the whole endeavor. Please feel free to send me holiday pics of your recently deceased buddies. Like Miley here, who died just after the holidays last year. What a sweetie. I miss her and I didn't even know her. 

[Thanks, Michael and Lisa!]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Verdant privacy features / TUE 12-9-25 / Pigmented rings / Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Lager / Termites, for an aardwolf / Gossip, in slang / "Edie & ___: A Very Long Engagement" (2009 documentary) / Music app named for a figure in Greek myth

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Medium 

THEME: HEDGEROWS (35A: Verdant privacy features ... or a punny description of the four longest answers in this puzzle) — phrases that "mitigate or weaken the certainty of a statement" (American Heritage Dictionary) (i.e. "HEDGE"s) appear in "ROWS" (i.e. as Across answers ... as opposed to Downs?):

Theme answers:

• "AS FAR AS I CAN TELL..." (17A: "Judging from the information available to me ...")
• "JUST SPITBALLING..." (23A: "These are merely my spur-of-the-moment suggestions ...")
• "FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH..." (50A: "Here's my two cents, which might not amount to much ...")
• "ONLY A THOUGHT, BUT..." (57A: "Feel free to dismiss this idea — however ...")

Word of the Day: Edie & THEA: A Very Long Engagement (2009 documentary) (47D) —

Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement is a 2009 American documentary film directed and produced by Susan Muska and Gréta Ólafsdóttir for their company Bless Bless Productions, in association with Sundance Channel. The film tells the story of the long-term lesbian relationship between Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, including their respective childhoods, their meeting in 1963, their lives and careers in New York City, Thea's diagnosis with multiple sclerosis and Edie's care for her partner, and their wedding in Toronto, Canada, in May 2007, because gay marriage was not then legal in their home state of New York.

Upon its initial release, the film was screened primarily at LGBTQ film festivals in 2009 and 2010. The Edie in the film's title was Edith Windsor, who after the death of Thea Spyer on February 5, 2009,^[1] was hit with an estate tax bill of $363,053 from the IRS. Had Thea been a man, Edie would have been exempt from this tax due to the marital exception. But the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as limited to a man and a woman, was in effect at the time. Windsor filed suit against the federal government on November 9, 2010, which ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States as United States v. Windsor. In June 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court rulings in Windsor's favor and declared that DOMA was unconstitutional. (wikipedia)

• • •

Conceptually, this is pretty interesting. The execution was a little rough for me in places, primarily because the length requirement (every themer a 15) is a Procrustean Bed that forces the phrases (sometimes painfully) into uniform shape. "AS FAR AS I CAN TELL" and "FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH" are perfect, actually. "JUST SPITBALLING" really wants an "I'm" to start it off and a "here" to follow it (it also kinda wants the final "g" to be elided, but that's a much more cosmetic issue). If you search "just spitballing," the "I'm just spitballing here" option comes up right away in the predictive search box:

So you lop off "here" ... it's still intelligible, it's fine. Doesn't land as smoothly as the first two I mentioned, but it lands. "ONLY A THOUGHT, BUT," on the other hand, feels contorted—ad-libbed, improvised, home-made in the clunkiest way. "Artisanal" hedge. Like "JUST SPITBALLING," it's missing the verb phrase up front, but somehow here, the omission is far more jarring. Which brings me to the next problem, which is "JUST A THOUGHT..." feels way more natural to my ear than "ONLY A THOUGHT”; if you go with "JUST A THOUGHT," you miss the "It’s” less. Also, the attachment of "BUT" starts a separate clause and so the whole answer feels far more awkward and gangly than the others. When you require every themer to be a perfect 15, these are the compromises you have to make.They didn't ruin the puzzle, but I felt their bumpiness for sure.

I like the revealer, though the "ROWS" part doesn't ... add much. I mean, crossword answers are, by definition / design, linear, so any answer in any grid might be considered a "ROW." There's nothing especially "ROW"-y about these answers. I suppose you can say that in a crossword grid (or spreadsheet) situation, "ROW"s go Across, whereas columns go Down, and so the Acrossness of the answers matters. But then most theme answers do run Across, so again the "ROW"-iness isn't exactly an exceptional feature of the theme. But no other revealer will do. HEDGES would be anemic. The grid-spanning nature of the theme answers does give them a certain hedgerow quality, in that they seem to divide the grid into lots. If your hedgerow really is a "privacy feature," then I guess you might run it from one end of your property to the other I don't know. I've got sugar maples. I think the theme works. Not spectacularly, but it works.

The fill seems pretty average, though at parts it ran a little tough for me, for a Tuesday. Perhaps the most un-Tuesday moment of the solve was THEA (47D: "Edie & ___: A Very Long Engagement" (2009 documentary)). I'm not sure there's any THEA answer famous enough to qualify as a Tuesday answer, but this one was a real "????" to me. The documentary is about a very important U.S. Supreme Court case, and it sounds fascinating, but yeesh, as a piece of trivia, it's pretty Friday/Saturday. This could easily have been THEO as far as I, the ignorant solver, was concerned (of course if THEA had been THEO then the couple could've legally married in the U.S. and the documentary would never have existed). THEA is one of the few answers where I think I'd prefer the good old-fashioned partial over any one person's name. You can see that the NYTXW relies a lot less heavily on the Billy Strayhorn / Duke Ellington Orchestra song than it used to...

.

..but I say: "Take THE A Train" is way better known than any other THEA option, and any puzzle that reminds me of Ellington can't be all bad. If you must use THEA ... then by all means, take THE A Train:

I stumbled in a few non-THEA places as well. For some reason DIET was not a word that leapt to mind at 14A: Termites, for an aardwolf, so even though I had the "D" in place, I wrote in DISH (?). I was today years old when I learned RICE BEER existed (inferable, but ???) (8D: Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Lager). I hesitated at the final letter of AREOLAS ... then defiantly wrote in the "S," daring the puzzle to do the stupid Latin plural thing to me (which thankfully it didn't) (25D: Pigmented rings). The ZEE / ZED crossing was actually a teeny bit tricky, since there's nothing in either clue to indicate "letter" (33A: 33-Down, across the Atlantic / 33D: 33-Across, across the Atlantic). 

Really loved the GAY / TEA / "Oh, MARY!" nexus. A dishily queer little cluster of words. My daughter did some work on the earliest, off-Broadway production of Oh, MARY! before it even opened (possibly carpentry, possibly something else having to do with production design), then was invited to work on the show once it moved to Broadway but already had other commitments. The show sounds hilarious but I've never seen it. I like that even if you've never heard of Oh, MARY!, you can infer the answer fairly easily because the clue gives you "Mrs. Lincoln."

Bullets:

• 48A: Sound from someone sitting down at the end of a long day ("AAH...") — still not sure how this differs from the sound you make at the dentist. AAH v. AHH is tricky for me. Also, I thought the "sound" here was going to be the sound of someone literally "sitting," like ... PLOP!
• 54A: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a ___" (old maxim) ("FIRE") — ugh, this is awful. It's a weak maxim to begin with, but also ... I've never, ever heard this so-called "maxim." Why in the world would you use a quotation if you don't know where it comes from? If the "maxim" is universally familiar, great, but this one is not—too long, too fussy, too banal to be truly well known. So the clue is fussy, overly long, not well known, and not interesting. Four strikes.
• 6A: One who might ask "Fair dinkum?" (AUSSIE) — got this easily enough, but still have no idea what that question is supposed to mean. Merriam Webster dot com says it's a general expression of approval. Not sure why it's appearing here in interrogative form.
• 58D: "J to ___ L-O! The Remixes" (2002 Jennifer Lopez album) ("THA") — first remix album to reach #1 on the Billboard 200 chart (I just learned). I had "THE" here for a half second before realizing "oh, no, if they're going to pop music, that's gonna be a THA"—and so it was.

That's all, see you next time. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. two more days to send in your 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 by Thursday of this week. Expecting to see a whole lotta cats in trees, just like Calypso here. Don't disappoint me!

[Thanks, Andrea]

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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